The present invention relates to a rendition style determining apparatus and method for automatically imparting music piece data with additional musical expressions on the basis of characteristics of the music piece data; for example, the present invention relates to an improved rendition style determining apparatus and method which can automatically impart various different musical expressions to a same set of music piece data in response to simple setting operation by a user.
The present invention also relates to a rendition style displaying/editing apparatus and method which can perform a predetermined display on the basis of music piece data and edit the music piece data using the predetermined display, such as impartment of additional musical expressions to the music piece data, and more particularly to an improved rendition style displaying/editing apparatus and method which can acquire, from external equipment, additional musical expressions automatically imparted to music piece data by the external equipment on the basis of characteristics of the music piece data and display and edit the thus-acquired musical expressions.
Today, there are known and used automatic performance apparatus for automatically performing tones on the basis of music piece data, sequencers for editing music piece data, etc. The music piece data used in such automatic performance apparatus, sequencers, etc. comprise MIDI data corresponding to various notes and musical signs and marks on musical scores. Where pitches of a series of notes are designated by only tone pitch information, such as note-on and note-off information, an automatic performance of tones executed by reproducing the music piece data tends to result in a mechanical, expressionless and musically unnatural performance. To make the automatic performance musically natural, beautiful and vivid, it is generally very effective to impart the tones with various musical expressions corresponding to rendition styles and the like. There have been known automatic rendition style determining apparatus as apparatus intended to automatically add musical expressions to tones. The rendition style determining apparatus automatically impart music piece data with performance information pertaining to rendition styles (or articulation) that are representative of musical expressions and peculiar characteristics of a musical instrument. For example, the rendition style determining apparatus automatically search through a music piece data set for positions suitable for impartment of rendition styles, such as a staccato and legato, and then add performance information pertaining to the rendition styles, such as a staccato and legato, to music piece data at the searched-out positions.
However, with the conventionally-known automatic rendition style determining apparatus, the music piece data set, having been automatically imparted with rendition styles, sometimes fails to be as originally desired or intended by a user. Namely, with the conventional automatic rendition style determining apparatus, which are designed to automatically detect positions, within a music piece data set, that are suitable for impartment of predetermined rendition styles and then impart the rendition styles to the detected positions, same rendition styles would always be imparted to positions of same conditions within the music piece data set. Namely, because positions of same conditions within each music piece data set tend to be always automatically imparted with same rendition styles, the music piece data set is not necessarily imparted with rendition styles as originally intended by the user. In order to change the positions to be imparted with rendition styles and the rendition styles to be applied to the positions, it should suffice to change conditions or criteria for determining individual rendition styles as necessary, but, with the conventional technique, it is very difficult to change settings of the rendition style determining conditions due to complexity of the settings. Thus, where the user is a beginner, the user has no choice but to appropriately change the rendition styles at the predetermined positions, one by one, through manual operation. Such manual changing of the rendition styles is extremely time-consuming and thus tends to result in a very poor processing efficiency.
Further, because the conventional rendition style determining apparatus are unable to feed results of the automatic rendition style determination back to external equipment, such as a sequencer, connected to the determining apparatus, they would present the inconvenience that the user can not ascertain the results of the automatic rendition style determination except by actually reproducing the music piece data, having been thus imparted with the rendition styles, via the rendition style determining apparatus,
Further, there have been known rendition style displaying/editing apparatus for editing rendition style information to be used to impart musical expressions. The rendition style displaying/editing apparatus are designed to display, on a screen, various rendition-style-containing performance information in a predetermined display style, such as a musical score display or piano roll display, on the basis of music piece data so that a user can use the screen to readily impart or delete performance information, representative of musical expressions and peculiar characteristics of a musical instrument, to or from the music piece data. With such rendition style displaying/editing apparatus, the user has to manually input desired rendition styles, one by one, to all appropriate positions of a music piece data set, so that an enormous amount of time would be required for the user to produce a music piece with desired rendition styles imparted thereto. As a consequence, the conventional rendition style displaying/editing apparatus would present the problem of an extremely poor efficiency.